Reflections on 10 years of the Institutional Web: Andy Powell

Much of the early stuff on the web gone … andy making many excuses about why haven’t got slides printed off … mentioned the jisc mail discussions … andy telling us about his history at UKOLN .. some things haven’t changed – Brian still around … Credit to the man for building a web community … beginning to have discussions about children’s perceptions as well as our own … Webmaster’s time line – starts 1969 first ERPANET, 1977 TCP/IP, 1990 HTTP invented, 1993 first GUI browser. Brian wrote what became the uk web bible in 1994 … we-support jiscmail list set up set up … 2001 RSS invented … blog 2002 … RSS re-appears reinvented 2000-2003 …Web 2.0 and AJAX 2005 … webmaster job title out of favour … now no common job description … Andre Cox paper coming out – study of how web people in HE see their role … andy met tim berner-lee and ukoln set up web server for him … andy then removed it and deleted his account – hadn’t heard of him – installed ncsa over it – embaressed by this now … in 1993 could list the number of webservers – could browse the whole web in afternoon … coloured books mentioned [no idea what this is myself] … web notice board – typically for sale 1997 5-6 per day … 2005 100+ per day .. manually approved by andy at the time … few cases of abuse … email and web form driven .. then went to no approval except for email address checking ... trend: move from from static to xml and dynamic interfaces and better quality and more accessible html … the portal phase for a little while but seems to have gone … control of content current topic – institutions used to worry about control but era of blogging has relaxed this … development of external services, web services etc … WebTechs story – lost the domain to a porn site … andy differs with brian about giving access to external services such as a gif on ukoln page … brian’s bible for webmasters – presentation at loughborough .. ran through some interesting web systems over the years … 1993- Follett report pivotal for andy – led directly to eLib programme and JISC strategy – very significant doc but words missing … pivotal diagram shown … open access – making research output available free on the web and self archiving … associating explicit open access licensing … all about the preservation of the scholarly record … mentioned e-Framework mentioned – about unbundling the VLE and service orientated approach … now a major activity in JISC … builds on Information Environment … jisc agenda is a digital library but the term not popular … little talk on web-support and web-info-mgt about e-learning .. surprisingly little talk or interest in this considering it is key activity of our sector education … metadata and semantic web hasn’t had impact and could almost say is an irrelevance …metadata talk at second iwmw – they got it wrong on this – didn’t see the role of automated processes … iwmw covers the real world activities and not as enmeshed with jisc view as could and should. Interesting as I’ve felt this myself - I remember very little interest in the elearning discussion group at Canterbury